Peanuts and the Charles Schulz Museum

Ever since I have known Brad, he has been a huge Peanuts fan. Like, obsessed. So when we had the opportunity to team up with The Peanuts Movie, we were absolutely thrilled. Brad had seriously always dreamed of visiting the Charles Schulz Museum and seeing his desk, THE desk where he drew all of those comics for all of those years. The timing also allowed it to happen a few days before Brad's birthday so it worked out to be a pretty amazing birthday present.

Lately I've been kinda lax in posting to Facebook or to Instagram, but have been using Snapchat way more. I know this will make me sound terribly old, but I find I can only really keep up with one form of social media at a time. I've really loved Snapchat lately, because it's more of a storytelling app, and instead of capturing just small snapshots, you're able to string those snapshots together as you go to tell the story. It's fun for traveling because I can save them to my phone and have a little video later that has all of those pieces of our trip. You can combine photos and videos and add captions and special graphic filters at locations (like stamps at airports.) Everything disappears within 24 hours and there's no way to comment or like a snap, so you don't have to overthink it. You can see who viewed your snap, but most of the time I don't even check that. I really am posting more for myself, and to let my friends who follow me get a secret little glimpse into my day. I feel like social media is such a game sometimes with people posting stuff just to get feedback and likes and it's kinda freeing to have an app that is focused on just sharing something with your followers, and it's special because they can only see it for that 24 hours. It is kinda annoying that it's vertical, though, because that doesn't really work well with Youtube or watching through horizontal devices lately. If you want to add me on Snapchat, my user name is KristiMontague. Here's a snap from our travel from Memphis, TN to Santa Rosa, CA, where the Charles Schulz museum is located (with a quick layover in Minnesota, it worked out to be a full day of travel!):

We only took Matilda on this trip and let Miles stay with grandparents since it was such a quick, work-focused trip (Travel Day | Filming day | Travel day) and such long flights. I assisted in behind the scenes photos and B roll footage and my mom was able to help watch Matilda while we were working. Our plan was to get lots of clips we could incorporate into a video we would film at our studio in Henderson later, and to interview Jean Schulz (widow of Charles Schulz and Craig Schulz (son of Charles Schulz and co-writer for the film.)

The staff at the museum was amazing. We shot almost everything early in the day before the museum or surrounding buildings opened and were able to have a private tour while we were there. The museum has only been around since 2002, but the buildings surrounding it have been there a lot longer--it's really more of a campus with a lot of different buildings and places that Charles Schulz and his family built and enjoyed before his death in 2000, an ice rink, the Warm Puppy Cafe, a private tennis court, a baseball field, and it's all within walking distance of his original home where his office still remains almost exactly how he left it. One of the most interesting and inspiring things to me and Brad that we drew from this trip was how Charles Schulz really influenced his local community. He grew up in Minnesota, where ice skating and hockey were an obvious part of the culture because of the location. In Santa Rosa, CA, there was no skating culture until he built an ice rink in 1969, and now so much of the community goes there to ice skate, or play hockey, or watch the ice shows throughout the year. Basically the "if you build it, they will come" mentality, which has had us dreaming up ways we could enhance and influence our small town.

Brad and Robby shooting in the gift shop. All of the architecture is so wonderfully late 60's and early 70's, and those colorful murals are made out of carpet!

Correy is on almost all of our trips and we don't have nearly enough photos with her! We love Correy! She works at SoulPancake and helps manage all of our KP stuff, but she's also basically part of our family now.

This mural and the story behind it was amazing. Charles Schulz painted this mural in 1951 for his daughter in their Colorado Springs home. After the Schulz family moved from this home, subsequent owners painstakingly restored the wall mural. (It was painted over multiple times, and the owner used cotton balls and sanding liquid and worked inch by inch to remove it, over the course of three months!) In September 2001, the entire wall was removed from the home and transported to Santa Rosa.

This mural is huge and amazing in person. It is made out of comic strips printed on horizontal ceramic tiles.

After we filmed around the museum and gift shop, we had the opportunity to go film in Charles' Schulz actual office. This is the office setup they recreated at the museum:

And here's Brad in the actual office:

They put a plexiglass case over his tools--they're left exactly how they were when he passed away.

After we finished filming, we visited the tennis court and Robby, Brad, Correy and one of the staff members played tennis for a bit.

We ate lunch at the Warm Puppy Cafe, where they have Snoopy sandwiches (Peanut Butter and Strawberry Jelly) that kinda look like Snoopy.

Matilda did really well on the trip, and it reminded us how easy it is to travel with just one kid, and how much easier traveling is when they're under one! Definitely good and bad things at every stage, though.

When we got back, I built a lot of fun cardboard props that I'll be sharing about in a separate blog post, but you can see the videos Brad made below!